Spend enough time staring into the abyss toward which the Left is hurtling us, and you eventually notice that political ideology is just a thin layer of scum coating the surface.
Politics is, after all, the art of properly organizing society toward the greatest good for the most people. It’s a strictly practical matter.
But listen to the Left long enough, and you realize that they never speak in practical terms. Their pitch is never, “Let’s marshal these resources in this way to solve that real problem.”
Instead, the Left always and everywhere speaks in strictly moral terms. To the extent that they express any concern for practical issues like pollution or poverty, the material problem is always ancillary to some moral panic.
To them, poverty is bad–not because people are hungry or homeless–but because they believe that poverty is a symptom of systemic social inequality between the majority and various sacred victim groups. The same goes for crime, education, and even healthcare.
Politics is just one tool the Left uses to advance its moral vision for the world. And an organization whose main purpose is spreading a particular moral vision based on a specific cosmology is called a religion.
When that religion’s fervent aim is destroying the cultural bonds that hold civilization together, you call it what it is–a Death Cult.
Conservatives have missed this for years. They’ve stubbornly restricted their criticism of the Death Cult to the political realm. This fetish for practicality is why Conservatives disregard art, among other culture war fronts, and why the Cult runs rings around them.
Leading Hispanic author Jon Del Arroz and I discussed this and other subjects cultural, spiritual, and literary on his stream last night. It was a rousing conversation that’s well worth your time.
Watch it here:
The Death Cult hates you. Stop giving them money. My new best selling new book shows you how.
I just got to that Chuck Wendig quote near the beginning.
My goodness, what a load of gobbledygook, buzzwords, and 8-year-old slang. These are the people in charge of what you like.
Woof.
They were bound to take control eventually. "Conservatives" are allergic to conserving good art.
*nods* It's a shame how even based zoomer dissidents have a huge blind spot when it comes to the arts.
Brian
Do you think this a failing of Anglosphere conservatism?
Originating from Protestantism's iconoclasm?
xavier
The conservative disdain for the arts really only kicked in around the 1960's. Before that their neglect for the arts was the complacency of presumed ownership.
Reclaiming the arts will be a generational process, but there's good reason to hope (for practical reasons, not just that Christ's ultimate victory is certain of course). Western Traditionalists have the immense advantage of being able to draw from the greatest repository of art and high culture in creation for reference and inspiration. To compare modern art to the endless depth of artistic riches that is our Christian heritage is something even the Death cult avoids, because it is laughably lopsided in our favour. Better to defame Christ through more indirect means, because the divine beauty of the Church is too powerful a proof to face directly.
I know you're more focused on providing and reclaiming popular entertainment, but I think being seen as the default high culture again is important too (which is why I love young artists like @owenbroadcast). Even if it's seen as snobbish, even modern walmart peasants have a semi-conscious respect for the tastes of "high-class" people as being something that's a bit beyond them and their simpler taste. Destroying this social proof of liberalism will be a necessary part of "breaking the conditioning" as Mr. Jones put it.
Modernist art isn't high class, it's the ultimate in low-class uplifted prol pretension and ugliness, and I look forward to people with a lot more artistic talent than myself demonstrating that in the future.
@Athletic:
You have a very good point. We have everything worth having. Even excluding some of the "classics" which display modernist or proto-modernist influences, the canon of Western music, literature, and theatre belongs to Christendom. The thing to remember about high culture, or the classics, is they're really just pop culture that has stood the test of time. Some art forms are more demanding than others, of course, as some artists have produced classics that are remembered for themselves (Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Henry V) and others that are remembered for who wrote them (Titus Andronicus).
@Athletic and Whitesplosive: I cosign your whole statement.